Sunday’s Obituary: Get to Google News Archives

One of today’s themes over at GeneaBloggers is Sunday’s obituaries. I’ve been fortunate in that many of my ancestors have been concentrated near and in the northwest corner of Ohio, most in Toledo. There is a wealth of free, genealogical data available via internet for the region through both FamilySearch.org and other venues. But I wanted to make special mention today regarding the Google News Archives.

Not long ago, Google announced it would no longer expand the service and has indeed made it more difficult to locate the archives. However, they are still available here: http://news.google.com/newspapers. There are many archived newspapers that you can browse and research for obituaries and newsclippings. This has been an invaluable source and when I get too tired of recording the uncountable number of Mierzejewski immigration records, I go here to see if I can backfill my genealogical data with obituaries or newsclips regarding my ancestors.

The Toledo area has three newspapers that are archived here:

The Toledo Blade. While the list states there are editions available from about 1869, there are huge holes in this collection. The collection is probably most valuable from about 1935ish forward. Many, many obituaries available for the 1940s forward.

The Toledo News-Bee. This is a good resource for news and some obituaries from about the 1910s through the 1930s.

The Toledo Sunday News-Bee. This is a “sister” publication to the News-Bee. There are huge holes in this series, but is starts at about 1901 and may contains obituaries for the Toledo region.

There are plenty of screen capture/snipping tools out there that can be used to grab what you need from these images. Google screen capture software if you need to obtain something to do this. (Of course, if all else fails, there’s always the ol’ PrintScreen and Paint trick, but a screen capture tool will make the job a bit easier.) Because I don’t want to make this a post about software or technology, I won’t go into any specific tools here. If you want a recommendation for a decent tool, drop me a message. There are free ones available that do a great job.

I’ve made some interesting discoveries and was able to ascertain some relationships by digging into these archives for obituaries and news bits. Hopefully, you too can before Google decides to fully retire this service. My thinking is that eventually it will go away, although I have not seen any statement yet to verify my thoughts.